his mothers eyes
by MemoirsoftheMoon
Summary: His father is as familiar as his own shadow, but there are days he doesn't know the woman in his own home. Autumn gapes and Shikadai recognizes her between the sweetness of dango on his tongue, a bitter past, and an uncertain future. character death


i am always late to the party. is Shikatema even cool anymore?

i dont care.

**_his mother's eyes _**

His zygomatic bone is definitely bruised as it pressed into the ground and the grit of the training field is dusted over the rest his face, sinking into the sweat and making him itch.

"Get up."

The whiplash voice makes him flinch, digging small pebbles further into his abused cheek. Damn woman might as well have cracked an actual whip for the way the air shivers after her spit up words.

"Up, Shikadai!"

Groaning, the boy forces his jellied joints back into formation and pushes himself up onto his elbows. Wisps of hair escape his formerly tight ponytail, getting into his eyes. Despite his pitiful appearance, the woman in front of him doesn't even twitch, continuing to stand tall with her shoulders thrown back.

"Mom..." The whine escapes the spaces of his teeth and he painfully crawls to his feet, feeling his kneecaps pop as he rises to his full height, "can't you go any easier on me?"

The crackle of lightning in his mother's eyes is the only answer he receives as she shifts her stance and plants her feet to root herself against the ground. Sometimes, Shikadai has to wonder if he really is related to his sun palette mother with her exotic coloring. They're nothing alike from her bared sharp canines and violent tendencies, his nonchalance and more prudent steps. But then, staring into the mirror images of emerald eyes under slick lashlines, he remembers he carries half of her inside.

_Clang!_ The heavy iron fan slams its bottom corner into the dirk, cracks scissoring out alarmingly. Shikadai has picked up the fan before and doesn't know how his mother still stands so tall and straight after years of war with that weight against her spine. He readies his hands and mimics her stance. _This is so troublesome_, he whined in his head, not daring to voice his opinion of the situation out loud. His mother might actually clobber him to death this time around.

The pebbles gather at the soles of her sandals and it won't be long before the dust devils rise to cover both of them in a thin screen.

"This time, don't you dare flinch."

o0o

It is sunset by the time his father takes pity on him and calls for his wife to halt her assault on her only child. Shikadai is breathless and dirt covered, his heart a hummingbird and his tendons taunt. The ocher light thrown across the field throws his mother in craggy shadows, leaves her in soft edges and chiaroscuro contours. No hair has escaped any of the four bunches she ties it in and the edge of her house kimono is still pristine.

She snaps her fan closed and effortlessly swings it to her back. Shikadai knows she must be in her late thirties, she's older than Dad after all, but blurred out as she is in this blooded light, he cannot find the lines at the corner of her mouth and the set in her eyes. In this second she is both older and younger than he's ever known her and he doesn't know how to swallow that.

There is disappointment thick and stale in the calculation of his mother's expression. _Such a drag_, he sighs with real weariness, resentment bubbling as lactic acid. His mother, furious and steady, apparently some sort of Sunagakure royalty before she came to sling deer shit with his father. He glares right back at her, scowling mightily, wondering why he asked to learn Wind Release and didn't just stick to shadows instead.

He's never going to measure up to her standards anyway, so why try?

There's a cough that breaks the tension.

"Temari," his father mumbles and Shikadai has to wince as the warning pops of his mom's knuckles ring through the air.

They have a standoff for another minute, arguing with their eyes. Suddenly, his mom's proud shoulder stance slips and she lets out an exhausted sigh.

"Good...good try Shikadai."

He gapes but she's already leaving him and his father behind.

o0o

"Why is she like this?" Shikadai whines as he limps alongside his father, ankles fixed on gelatin and every pore of his body steaming with exertion. It's autumn and evening encroaches quickly, lengthening the shadows he throws while the wind carries the smell of roasted chestnuts and baked sweet yams.

_Why are we always at odds, why does she never stop nagging? Why does she poke and prod at every single goddamn thing like it's a personal insult?_

She never flinches but she still aims shuriken at shadows and harps on Skikadai to do the same.

His father looks like him, pale and sharp, cleaved by the full moon and her whispered night. He's tall enough Shikadai still has to tilt his head, broad like a hunter, skills set behind his eyes in dark humor. Black eyes should have been dominant, but the stubborn green of his mother's leaked through the supposedly strong Nara genes. When he had asked _why these eyes_, all those years ago, his father simply threw his head back and laughed, telling him that the males of the Naras would always be helpless before the will of fierce women.

"Shikadai, what do you know of Mom?"

"Uh..." color floods his battered cheeks when he can't say much. He has two uncles, one a Kazekage of a desolate land, the other a frightening figure in black that dabbles in the lost art of pupeteering. No one in Shikadai's generation dares to approach such a lost and arguably useless jutsu craft. He has visited Suna twice in his young life and doesn't think too much of it, it's hot and sprawling like a beetle supine, eviscerated vessels for streets, empty exoskeleton for gaudy charms. He has never understood why his Mom always turns in the direction of the sun, longing written on the edges of her tight eyes.

Like he knows what Shikadai is thinking (and hey, he probably does, they all say Dad is a genius) the words come slow.

"When we met, Suna was even more chaotic and dead than how you perceive it now. There was nothing but hate, blood, sandstorms, and war."

Shikadai flinches. War is an abstract concept to him. All the elders carry the mantle of it and it's a barrier between them all, the battered adults and the rosy eyed children. The new generation can't understand the silence, the still present, instinctual looks into closets and cobweb corners, and the adults can't understand the contentment and the lackadaisical disregard of tradition and training.

A hand claps onto his shoulder and his father smiles his easygoing smile.

"If you have time tonight, ask her."

o0o

Dinner is quick when he gets home. Somehow in the space of ten minutes it took him and his father to walk back his mom has tidied up and set out food. Its leftovers, hurriedly heated but it's home cooked and steaming nonetheless.

His mother washes up as soon as he and his father finish eating, bustling at the kitchen like she's never been anything but a housewife. It's a paper thin deception though, Shikadai has too many scars on his fingers from mishandled kunai in the backyard to ever be lulled into the pretense that his mother is a soft woman.

His father kisses her and leaves.

Mom is still swirling water on dishes but she seems far away. Evening is gentle. Shikadai approaches and watches her for a moment, observing the curved lines of her body. He's never paid attention to Nara Temari before, she has always just been _here_. She's here to scrub the tatami mats and open the windows, the one to wash the sheets and kick their father. He is only all too familiar with chakra wind blasts that blow the tiles off of roofs and force her to repair them in the same day.

"What are you staring at me for, you fool child?" His mom turns around, hands on her hips, an unhappy set to her mouth.

His shoulders tug up in a nonchalant shrug and he sticks his hands into his pockets. This standoff is as familiar and dusty as the toy deer lining the windowsill of his bedroom. Mom and him have always been at odds and why wouldn't they be? She drives and nags at him through every waking second.

"I'm just wondering…" he starts, watching the mirror reflection of his own eyes slit for battle.

"What?"

Outside, the cicadas call for clemency and darkness pushes in. The soft hum of the overhead lights seems to grow.

"Why are you this way?"

For one long minute the evening holds his breath as for the second time his mother's knuckles pop off warning shots. Shikadai winces, expecting the worse, drop steps backwards on the defensive. Instead of the expected explosion and the crumpling of the kitchen counter for the third time this month, his mother turns. The tightline of her shoulders slump and she raises her head again to where the moon would be if they had a skylight.

"Come. Let's get dango."

o0o

There's a stand near their home he and his mother frequent, a sweet Auntie who smiles dolefully and hands out the stacked snacks late into the nights. She's plump and soft like the treats themselves and Shikadai likes that her full cheeks are steamed pink like the top dango on the stick. Shikadai accepts his treat with a quiet "Thank you," and bites eagerly into the middle one. He knows he gets his sweet tooth from his mother, his father tolerates sugar but his mother is the one who treks out nearly every week to get her fix of mochiko.

The velvet blue of Konoka evening blankets over them as they eat their dessert. The cobbled streets are being replaced with pavement but they're still windingly crooked. His mother finishes her stick of dango first and reaches down to grasp his left hand, spinning the empty toothpick in her own free hand. He blushes but doesn't tug away.

It's uncool to be holding hands with your mother at thirteen but it would be too troublesome to remove his sticky fingers from her warm, calloused grip.

"I miss Suna," she breaks suddenly, licking syrup from her lips.

The statement freezes him. He's paralyzed. What does it mean that his mother misses Suna? She belongs here. With him. With Dad.

"Nights like these," his mom tilts her head and in a terrifying trill of heartbeat he realizes he _doesn't_ know this woman, "I think of the wind in Suna. It's got a cry, do you remember Shikadai? You might have been too young. But there are no trees and so the wind makes its own lullabies in the evenings."

He didn't remember. He hated the few time they did visit. What was the appeal?

"I am a Sunan Kunoichi," his mother declares and his marrow crackles in alarm. "I was born of the Sand and one day when I die, you will cremate me and half my ashes with mingle with your fathers, half of me will be taken to the Wind in Suna to do as it wishes."

"Mom," he breathes, "don't talk like that - "

"What do you know of war, Shikadai?" His mother asks gently, interrupting him.

He chose on the end of the dango stick and cannot answer, trying to keep his patent calm. The gentleness and tact with which his mother is choosing her words, setting them down like buds in springtime, is unnerving. It is autumn and the wind whispers awful things between the shivering of drying leaves, scattering them in protest.

"Suna was in revolt and war when I grew up," his mother continues, reaching up to catch a fallen leaf, "it had been in steady decline for years before I was born. The gold dust we were so known for had all been mined away. The council was corrupt. Your grandfather was a madman with a cruel streak."

How can this all be said so casually? She might as well be rattling off statistical data as he's seen her do when arguing with Dad. The numbers that beat his father down and force him to concede to her point, all said in that bland, unassuming tone that leaves old plaque on the cavern of his mouth.

"Your Uncle Gaara, of course, took the brunt of that. He – " she breaks off then, shudders with old fear, musty and rotted with guilt, "never…never mind."

Nara Temari fears nothing and no one. It is a rule as deep as the life line in his palms enclosed around the stick that held his treat.

"The point is," she continues brusquely, "I trained every day so that I might survive in that arid heat. Might teach my stomach to digest rough roots and shriveled leaves. Might still run with a sip of water. Could still swing that tessen you see if my guts were hanging about my feet. And sometimes…all that happened and more."

The dango stick cracks in threes in her left hand and she whirls suddenly, kneeling before Shikadai. He's breathing hard and looks into her wide, clear eyes. _There's_ the woman his father fell for with despite the cadence of heckling that now defines their home as much as the painted deer on sliding doors. The strength, the fierce unrelenting tumult. The perseverance despite fear and pain.

The love.

He doesn't know her but his heartbeat slows the recognition that she is familiar as the clouds that overhang Konoha.

There are gentle hands in his hair, fingers combing through the snarls left after training. The usually astringent edges of his towering mother are molten and he wonders, when did she lower herself, staring at him like he was the treasure of the universe?

"You are a product of love, Shikadai," and it's the voice that tried to coo lullabies when he was three despite a life time of brass command baying, "I was a product of war and revenge and built to be collateral damage at the end of the day. My life was going to be meaningless.

"Until I met your father. And then I had you. You are my little fawn. My son. Let the war come. I pray to the wind and flame it does not. But if it must, I will make you ready so you do not fall."

He's crying now, big tears rolling down his cheeks, sharp convex slopes so like his father's. But the red rimmed eyes he sees reflected in those still pools are all his mother's.

She pulls him close and he desperately tries not to stab her with the dango stick still clutched stupidly in his hand as he squeezes her to him. Afraid to lose her. Terrified that the sun and sand and wind will scour her soft flesh away and scatter the strong bones.

Because she belongs here. With him. He is still an adolescent and he needs her barked orders and narrowed gazes. Still young warrant a fresh hot breakfast every morning and grilled mackerel for dinner every night. Necessary to get adjusted for the way he throws his shuriken and yelled at for the way his clothes never find the hamper, always the floor.

He needs his mother and needs that heart in her chest to be focused on him, not a faraway fabricated war.

"I never thought I would get to this point, don't you know?" his mother sighs as she wipes away his tears with the pads of her thumb, "my fate was to die with my feet planted in revolt, serving my country." A smile steals away at her lips, a twist that reminisces the ochre sunset, "but of course your lazy bum of a father just had to take notice of me."

The dango stick he still clutches finally snaps in the nighttime dirge of cicadas. For some crazy reason as he holds his mother's firm form, he remembers Anko-sensei. Once a glorious jounin, now a middle-aged waxed figure melting from her former glory. What about his mother? He wonders. Could he ever see his straight-backed sickle tongued mother waddling and wrung out at the edges?

A lifetime of worry hangs at her sharp eyes (_his _eyes) and her hands are ossified from metal and wind. No. He realizes with sudden cold clarity. His mother's fate is to not see him to the end.

She'll die in this next great battle. It'll be her last. It'll be up to him to tell his children of his Sunakurge fierceness and the set of her mouth as she harangues him. _Harangued_. His father's fate is to sit by a shougi board, tired and shredded and bowed with loss as he mumbles old war stories. Not his mother. Not Nara Temari.

Mom," he very nearly hiccups, sickened and razed by this revelation. but she shushes him with a kiss to the forehead and stands erect.

"Shall we go home Shikadai?"

What can he do but take her hand?

o0o

The war comes as all the adults expect and brace themselves against.

It's a banal, ravaging thing and Shikadai learns what loss is as his friends fall around him. The responsibility his mother is always bellowing about is heavy as a mantle around his shoulders, it constricts his throat like his shadow strangling technique, every single time Inojin and Cho-Cho turn to him, faces open and desperate and wide.

He watches in horror as his home falls, rebuilds, is decimated again.

But he is ready. He doesn't run from the war, doesn't fall back to watch the clouds, he is at the front line, lashing Boruto into formation with his tongue, taking stance of his mother and the heaving shadows of his father.

It is in war that Shikadai finally feels he knows his parents. The one time he fights with his father on the field, watching his Shadows swoop, and squeeze, and _kill_, the narrowed cleaved concentration in his face…Shikadai is awed and frightened.

His mother's old fan glints in the sunlight of the battlefield, her face smeared in blood that somehow suits her better than any lipstick or powder ever has. Her breaths are steady and the trees fall, crushing the enemy without them advancing toward her at all.

He isn't ready when Suna calls for his mother.

The day she leaves, there is a full meal in the fridge, beer in the pantry, and his favorite snacks tucked within the cabinets. When he thinks back, later, he will realize that she doesn't hug him, keeps a careful respectful distance from her adolescent son as she bows, as though he might be an equal. Instead she anointed his forehead with a last Ash Wednesday kiss, turns her back.

Leaves.

He's not prepared when the shroud comes back from Suna, bloody and dusted. Gaara and Kankuro came as pallbearers themselves, stoic statues frozen and cracked beneath the harsh sun. Not prepared as he fights his way into the room to lean over his father as the cheesecloth is pulled back. Surprisingly, her face is serene in repose, jaw slightly slack, eyes closed. Those lips will never move again to whine that he hasn't tossed his shuriken correctly. Those eyes (her eyes, _his_ eyes) are closed will never open again to show him a twinkling, wiser version of his own.

His father isn't weeping but his shoulder shake. Capsized.

Shikadai kneels down and whispers, "You're home, Mom."

_Thank you for your complaints, and your pushing. Thank you for surviving Suna and your past._

_Thank you for being my mother._

_Thank you for your eyes._

Shikadai stands, wipes his tears, and goes to pick up his bag of kunai.

_**finite**_

* * *

this is really disjointed but i wanted to get it out. Temari really resonates with me as a character and i can see her loving her son desperately but still not showing it correctly. and Shikadai not knowing how much he needs her until she is gone.

i'm not that familiar with Boruto so i don't know how the war is starting in that series.


End file.
